Weird Cases: Comic and Bizarre Cases from Courtrooms around the World

Many of this book's anecdotes are genuinely interesting, and, as Slapper covers cases from around the world, it gives an intriguing insight into the application of law beyond the UK.

My favourite tales include one from Romania two years ago, where there was an attempt to bring in a law making the media broadcast one good news story for every bad one in an attempt to cheer up the population. It was decided that skewing news in this way would not reflect reality and would restrict freedom of expression, making it unconstitutional. What a shame.

In the UK, there was a case about a couple from Basingstoke in which the Court of Appeal ruled that it was reasonable for a wife to ration her husband to sex once each week. The press reports were predictably flippant, even in The Times which ran the headline 'Sex once a week enough, appeal judge says'. There were objections when journalists later tried to interview judges' wives!

As recently as 2008, a German employer stood by his decision to fire non-smokers and replace them with smokers because they have a better team spirit! He considered non-smokers to interfere with corporate peace and spend their time complaining about smokers.

One recent case is today's equivalent of the ginger beer snail in Donoghue v Stevenson. In Canada in 2001, Mr Mustapha noticed one and a half dead flies in the bottom of an unopened water bottle as he loaded it onto a dispenser at home. He became depressed and said his discovery wrecked his sleep and his sex life. He sued the bottled water supplier for $341,000 for psychiatric injury. Yet more incredible is the fact that the trial judge awarded him damages, but the Canadian Supreme Court overturned the award as the injuries were not reasonably foreseeable.

The barmy tales certainly do entertain. However, my criticism is that the book arose from a weekly column written by Slapper with the same title which has appeared on the Times Online since 2007. He explains in the book's preface that he has arranged the stories in thematic chapters and tried to give them additional context. However, I don't think the book flows well and it is apparent that the various stories were originally written as discrete articles. The overall impression is quite disjointed.

I would compare it to the disappointment one can feel on reading one of Jeremy Clarkson's books, on the assumption that it will be as brilliantly written as I find his Sunday Times articles to be, only to find that it is actually a cut and pasted scrapbook of those very same articles and does not hang together well as a book. It probably lines his pockets nicely though, and I hope the same can be said for Slapper '“ although I suspect his market is somewhat narrower.